Another Mortgage Fraud NG verdict

This time it was before Judge Graham on a retrial of a bunch of defendants (the first jury hung). Trial took about a month. Defense lawyers were: Mike Smith, Sherri Romano, Orlando do Campo, Len Fenn, Marty Feigenbaum, Scott Sakin, Peter Patanzo, and Israel Escinosa. Congrats.

More of these cases need to go to trial.

Tom Meeks receives Court's "Unsung Hero" award

This week, the Southern District of Florida bench awarded Tom Meeks the "Unsung Hero" award for his work on the local rules committee. Congratulations! Last year Brian Spector received it. Here's a picture of Meeks giving his acceptance speech. (That's Judge Palermo's head on the right.)

Congrats to the 3 who made the cut

A reliable source tells me that the Federal JNC will recommend Jerald Bagley, John O'Sullivan, and Bob Scola to the Senators. Congratulations to those three!

Interesting facts: all three are judges, two state and one federal magistrate. Bagley and Scola were finalists for the last seat as well. Kathy Williams is still waiting to be confirmed for that seat...

UPDATE-- Kendall Coffey sent this email late last night to the 16 applicants:

On behalf of the Southern District Conference of the Florida Federal Judicial Nominating Commission, I want to express our appreciation for the time you spent with us during your interview today. You are to be commended for your impressive presentation and qualifications as well as for your service to the public and to our profession. Because of the high quality of the applicants, these were truly difficult decisions. As a result of the deliberations that followed the interviews, the District Conference members have selected the following finalists whose names will be forwarded to Senator Nelson and Senator LeMieux in accordance with Rule 27 of the Florida Federal JNC Rules of Procedure:

Jerald Bagley

John J. O’Sullivan

Robert N. Scola, Jr.


Again, we are grateful for the opportunity to have met with you and truly appreciate your participation in this important process.

Kendall Coffey

Good luck to the applicants for Judge Huck's seat

The JNC is conducting interviews all day today. Good luck to all 16.

Justice Stevens weekend

Justice Stevens was everywhere this weekend. In the NY Times, discussing the death penalty:

In 1976, just six months after he joined the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment after a four-year moratorium. With the right procedures, he wrote, it is possible to ensure “evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law.”

In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Justice Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional.
But the reason for that change of heart, after more than three decades on the court and some 1,100 executions, has in many ways remained a mystery, and now Justice Stevens has provided an explanation.

In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.
The essay is remarkable in itself. But it is also a sign that at 90, Justice Stevens is intent on speaking his mind on issues that may have been off limits while he was on the court.

The whole review by Justice Stevens is worth a read.

Stevens was also on 60 Minutes:



It's amazing to watch him -- he still seems young and vibrant. I didn't know that his father was convicted and that an appellate court reversed the conviction. He discusses how that impacted him as a kid and as a judge. He also was at the game where Babe Ruth called the shot, and he talks about that as well. Great stuff.

UPDATE -- Rumpole has more on the Stevens interview here.